How Nvidia’s 3D Vision works with Skyrim, Battlefield 3, and others

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Battlefield 3

This game has been generating a ton of buzz and shelf-scorching sales, and for a good reason: It’s pretty darn fun. I didn’t remotely have a bad time playing it, and some parts were much more invigorating than I’d expected. But of all the titles I looked at, this one used 3D in by far the least satisfying way. Whenever you were getting up close and personal with your gun, such as zooming in on a target, the look and layout of the graphics catapulted you right onto the front lines. But the more ordinary running and shooting scenarios had a middle-school diorama quality that I found a turnoff. The character modeling is shaky to begin with (I don’t think “square-jawed” is supposed to be taken quite so literally), but adding in the 3D element only made these rough edges more prominent.

To be honest, I had a better time with the stereoscopic 3D disabled; against a fully flat, more overtly nonrealistic world, it was less of a challenge to accept the cartoony cardboard-cutout characters I was fighting alongside. I’ll definitely continue to play this game for its rocket-fueled pace and outstanding action elements, but the 3D is most likely not coming on again.

L.A. Noire

Though it suffers from issues similar to those that afflict Battlefield 3 (particularly with its depiction of people), L.A. Noire generally looks a bit better. Part of this is due, I think, to its much more consistent design scheme. Whereas Battlefield 3 looks like a gritty war simulation populated by awkward marionettes, Rockstar unquestionably made this game all of a piece. Making it look like the video-game equivalent of a Raymond Chandler novel imparts enough pitch-black whimsy that scoping out the boundaries of the uncanny valley is easier to digest. Plus, regardless of what problems crop up in the countless scenes of human interaction, there’s a lot more variety to be found throughout the game. The driving sequences, in particular, look terrific and balance focus almost perfectly. (I’m not typically a big fan of driving games, but if they all looked this good I might convert.)

The one drawback? The various story cut-scenes aren’t in 3D at all. For many games I’d look past this, but because L.A. Noire is essentially an adventure game with occasional FPS and sandbox pretensions, that’s almost impossible. With so many of these scenes to remind you of the game’s artificiality, it’s difficult to lose yourself in the 3D. That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it is frustrating.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Given how good this game looks under ordinary circumstances, there was no reason to expect it would look bad — or even unsatisfactory — when decked out with stereoscopic 3D. And, of course, it doesn’t. This was by far the most immersive of the four games (again, no small feat given how engrossing Skyrim is anyway), but it was also the least intrusive.

I never wondered, as I did with Battlefield 3 and L.A. Noire, about the depth of what I was seeing, or how this object or that person looked at this distance or that distance. Instead, I could only marvel at how much more real everything looked: at the way trees “stacked” as they dotted up a hill, at the subtle softening of a group of people standing behind the man I was talking to, at the way combats became so much more intense because they’re so point-blank “in your face” to start with that they seem to live up to the 3D ideal movies have been struggling to meet since the 1950s. So effortlessly was all of this presented that Skyrim was the hardest of the games to write about: How do you explain what you can barely detect? But because this meant that I no longer had to think about it — I could just accept it, the way I do all the games I play without stereoscopic 3D — I couldn’t be happier.

Batman: Arkham City

Though Skyrim had what looked to my eye like the best visual use of 3D, Batman: Arkham City made the best game-play use of it. Like L.A. Noire, Arkham City has an inimitable style: In this case, a kind of comic-book hyperrealism. It doesn’t look “accurate” by any common definition of the term, but it feels right in every way (a good thing when you’re playing a guy in a bat costume chasing after people variously dressed as cats, clowns, and penguins). Like Skyrim, the game is intensely detailed, with the interplay of what’s right in front of your face, what’s just beyond your face, and what’s way beyond your face all vital to establishing the proper atmosphere. In other words, Arkham City’s fantastical design and concrete physical expectations are a superb vehicle for the unreality of 3D — whether in the game’s on-the-fly cut scenes or in the midst of regular play.

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